"Is Harry Reid Strong Enough?"

Do monkeys fly out of my butt? Probably not.

A lot of people complain about friendly fire inside the Democratic Party. Fuck those people. If you don't demand electoral accountability on the issues that matter to you with your vote, you're just an idiot, or worse, a servant.

Update:

Just check out this post at TPM, Reid's office has "scoffed" at such efforts. Why? Because they don't see their office as accountable to the people they represent. That's not how they want to play this game. They actually have a certain amount of real contempt for democracy.

Binyam Mohamed Gets Closer to the Truth

Monsters:

While Mohamed, a British resident, was in American custody, the CIA told British intelligence agents exactly what was done to him... [his] genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, "is very far down the list of things they did," the official said.

So when are the right-wing radio pundits going to have their genitals sliced on air to show that it's not so bad? Inquiring minds want to know.

Tell You Whut

If there's a health care bill passed that mandates that everyone has to buy insurance from the vultures, and it doesn't provide a public option, ...

I don't know. Are people just going to take it? I suspect electoral fallout, but no effective push back by the people against Congress to change the law after the fact. I'm not sure people give a fuck.

The real nasty thing is that the whole country, most of the House, and a great many Senate dems are all about the public option. And yet, it's still somehow up in the air, now that it's in the hands of His Royal Majesty Harry Reid.

How to Fail at Foreign Policy

This really is a very, very interesting and thoughtful tear down of the argument for threatening Iran with catastrophic bombing to get what "we" (I use the term loosely) want out of them:

And this gets rather to the core of the problems with Herf's approach. He assumes away Iranian domestic constraints, in spite of overwhelming evidence that a) dictatorships face internal constraints based on public pressure on bureaucratic infighting, b) that domestic constraints have unpredictable, and indeed often positive, effects on negotiating stances, and c) that dire military threats often empower the domestic actors in target countries that we're least interested in seeing gain power. He seems to believe that since the regime successfully stole an election and hasn't collapsed in the past three months, that it is free of domestic constraints. Such a position does not, as they say, demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of the way that authoritarian regimes operate; indeed, it would likely get Herf laughed out of an Introduction to Comparative Politics course.

Connection Reset By Beer

This has made the kwality of my life go up, quite a bit more than I suppose it ought to have:

$ cat ~/.ssh/config

ServerAliveInterval 180

C'mon Man, Hook Me UP, I gotta warehouse fulla stickers!

I've never heard of a DMV sticker that was easy to remove from your windshield, but the Empire State has nonetheless achieved such. I have one on my windshield, too. For a little while longer, anyway.

The fine for the thing coming off is $100. VOTE MIKE NYC.

Wanker of the Day

John Gruber:

To any American who isn’t happy about our president having won the Nobel Peace Prize: There is something wrong with you.

From Glenn Greenwald, on this topic:

[T]o insist that it's the patriotic obligation of every American to stand and cheer -- and that those who don't are "casting their lot with the Terrorists" -- is creepy and repugnant. It's also a very dangerous game to play.

There is something seriously wrong with people who use the cudgel of nationalism to insist that dissent is illegitimate. Sure, there were some people really freaking the fuck out, and there is something wrong with some of those people. But there are a whole lot of dirty fucking hippies like me who think it's inappropriate to award a peace prize to someone who is "advocating, actively prosecuting and escalating, a major war that is killing large numbers of civilians with no plans to stop, while at the same time building prisons to house people who will have no due process."

Oh well, guess it's time to turn in my citizenship and go back to... where exactly?

Autolux

I recently had the pleasure of attending the recent All Tomorrow's Parties event in Monticello, NY, with Mr. Forde. One of the things I just didn't expect was that:

1. I was getting to see Autolux
2. That it would be one of the best performances I've seen in recent memory

So, here I am, minding my own business, and an Autolux tshirt just arrived for me in the mail, and I figured I should say: hey, check this out!

Their album Future Perfect has been out for some time now, and they're new record is supposedly due out in January. FP is beautiful, howling, grooving and deranged pop music, but despite this I didn't expect that during performance the band would be so loud, so powerful, so pounding. From songs I didn't recognize, possibly off the forthcoming LP, to the songs that I did know from FP, it was an astonishing set, with their drummer Carla doing an incredible amount of programming work from behind the kit while crushing out, marching-snare style, one of the tightest sets I've ever seen.

I think Mr. Forde and I fell in love with Carla that evening. Definitely.

In any event: AUTOLUX. Check it out. Watch for the new record. (Trying to get hold of an advance copy now, but I'm not holding my breath!)

Does Not Compute

How many people, at this point, order things on the Internet with their credit card, and then have it sent to some address that is not their billing address?

I'm guessing at this point, it's got to be a lot of people. Many people (like me) can't get reliable delivery of packages at their home. It's really common in cities.

So why is this still a problem with so many merchants, merchant gateways, and credit card companies like Discover? In this case, Discover is the culprit. A credit card company. A credit card company. Not the kind of business of renowned prudence and foresight.

Perhaps I'm Being a Naysayer

But I really don't find the whole Big Apps initiative that interesting because the city data I think is most interesting is transit data, and that won't be included.

And that highlights one of the most retarded things about transit development in NYC - it's controlled by a regional authority, and not the city.

Think about this sentence: NYC does not have control of its own transit system.

You can go on and on about how nice it is to share power with the state, or upstate republicans, or naussau county republicans who insist on driving to work and scuttling the LIRR and Metro North, but who's city is this, anyway?

Fear & Loathing in NYC

If you hadn't already lost all respect for Bono, perhaps this will do it:

BIG HAIR

This. kicks. ass. yes.

Eat your heart out, W'burg butches.

Taking these moves to the club

This is the most awesome video ever:

Dearth

There's something more-lame-than-normal about this:

Green Day - New Music - More Music Videos